S3 Ep50: Trump's Imperialism

Website: https://www.therightpodcast.org/
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Trump was never a peace candidate. From his early Reform Party days to his “America First” doctrine, he wasn’t seeking an end to U.S. empire. Instead he wanted to strip it of regulation, diplomacy, and disguise. In this episode, I unpack how Donald Trump’s foreign policy was misread from the start — first framed as less hawkish by figures like Glenn Greenwald than Hillary Clinton, later described by academics like John Mearsheimer as realist, whether Trump realized it or not. But from his 2000 Reform Party flirtation to his 2016 “America First” campaign, Trump never sought to dismantle empire — he wanted to privatize it.

I trace how Trump repackaged old anti-globalist rhetoric with psuedo business logic, treating places like Gaza and Ukraine as assets to be claimed, not communities to be protected. He didn’t want peace. He wanted the end of the neoliberal world order — not to replace it with global justice, but with a deregulated empire unbound by alliances, international law, or oversight. Think less withdrawal, more hostile takeover.

What’s chilling is how this wasn’t just tactical — it was ideological. Russian fascist Aleksandr Dugin saw Trump as a civilizational rupture, not a restrainer of empire but its metamorphosis into something new and authoritarian.  Dugin, in some ways, sees Trump clearer than the liberal media and politicians of the West.

This episode dives into that fundamental misunderstanding — from the Reform Party to Gaza, Ukraine, and the post-liberal future Trump seems to imagine: an unapologetic, race- and class-coded imperial order in which stronger nations simply take what they want, and weaker ones are absorbed, relocated, or erased. . It’s not just empire without apology, it’s empire without brakes.